Friday, October 22, 2010

Imagining you’d come to say goodbye..., by Jennifer Reeser

Johann Sebastian Bach - Cello Suite No. 2 Sarabande with Pablo Casals

Imagining you’d come to say goodbye,
I made a doll of raffia and string.
I gave her thatch hair, and a broomstick skirt
of patchwork satin rags. Around each eye
I stitched thick lashes. Such a touching thing
she was! That even you could not debate –
impassive, undemanding and inert.
Yes, surely she’d cause you yourself to sigh.
Around her breast, I sewed a loden ring
to guard her cotton heart from being hurt,
then sat down in the fabric scraps to wait,
between the rafters and the furnace grate,
needle in hand, and never so aware
no craft on earth is master to despair.

welcome

Manuela

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're now just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature. A poem can add its grain to all the other grains and that is, I think, a rather important thing to do.- Adrienne Rich

The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant. - Denise Levertov

Before, under, and through the wonderful terrible wrestling with words and music there is a state of mind which I’m calling ‘poetic attention’ ... a sort of readiness, a species of longing which is without the desire to possess, and it does not really wish to be talked about. - Don McKay

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I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. - Ursula Le Guin